Literary Giants Literary Catholics (54 page)

Dali’s best known, if not necessarily his best, religious painting is, without doubt,
Christ of Saint John of the Cross
(1951). This work, inspired by a drawing of Christ attributed to Saint John of the Cross in Avila, Spain, is now one of the most popular religious pictures in the world. Printed reproductions are sold by the millions to Protestants and Catholics alike, and the work has become an object of, or at least a channel for, pietistic devotion on an enormous scale. It is indeed ironic that Dali is best known to the world at large as the painter responsible for
Christ of Saint John of the Cross
, in much the same way that Jean-François Millet is best known as the painter of
The Angelus
. The irony springs from the fact that Dali was obsessed throughout his life with Millet’s painting, beguiled no doubt by its iconographic status, and variations on
The Angelus
recur as a potent motif in many of his works. One wonders what the shade of Dali would think of one of his own works being judged by posterity as pietistically synonymous with Millet’s masterpiece.

Another intriguing coincidence, or providential correlative, connected with Dali’s painting of
Christ of Saint John of the Cross
relates to the fact that Roy Campbell published his award-winning translations of the poems of Saint John of the Cross in 1951, the same year in which Dali was working on his painting. In both cases, and in both cases somewhat unjustly, the artist and the poet have become best known as translators of the work of their saintly predecessor.

It was also in 1951 that Dali was commissioned by the Italian government to produce two hundred watercolor illustrations for an edition of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. It was a labor of love in which Dali clearly identified himself with Dante. He also illustrated
Don Quixote
and, in 1965, the Bible, for which he produced one hundred water-colors. In working so conscientiously and diligently on
Don Quixote
, the
Divine Comedy
and the Bible, Dali was genuflecting before the giant works of Christendom and was pouring out his thoroughly modern genius as a libation before the altar of traditional Christianity.

In 1958 Dali finally solemnized his marriage to Gala, setting his moral life in order, and in the following year he had an audience with Pope John XXIII in Rome. After years of wandering in the wilderness of Freudian self-delusion, Salvador Dali was finally coming Home. In 1982 Gala, Dali’s beloved wife, his Beatrice, died. “She is not dead”, Dali insisted. “She will never die.” Following her death, he abandoned public life and lived a largely reclusive existence until his own death at the age of 85 on 23 January 1989.

Having played the detective and having examined the facts, we are closer to understanding the real Salvador Dali. Nonetheless, he remains an enigma, a conundrum of contradictions, who defies simple categorization. He was a genuine Catholic and a genuine genius, but he was clearly not a saint or a naturally pious believer, at least not in the sense that sanctity and piety are normally measured. His eclecticism and eccentricity are, at one and the same time, both beguilingly charming and incongruently irritating. He remained adolescently fixated with the phallic and other forms of eroticism, a weakness that continued to mar his work long after he had sought to shed the Freudian dream-fixations of his youth. He was also, on occasion at least, surprisingly candid about his philosophy of life, most notably in his exposition of a personal credo in the form of a list of pros and cons. He was, he wrote, for diversity and against uniformity; for hierarchy and against equality; for the individual and against the collective; for metaphysics and against politics; for eternity and against progress; for dreams and against mechanics; for the concrete and against the abstract; for maturity and against youth; for theater and against cinema; for tradition and against revolution; for religion and against philosophy; and for folly and against scepticism. There is enough material in this list alone to facilitate another full-length article in the quest for Salvador Dali, and the list, as quoted, is not even exhaustive.

Although the quest for Dali will doubtless continue, we can certainly get closer to the real Dali than many of his critics imagine. Take, for example, the critic John Russell Taylor, who wrote an opinionated article in
The Times
entitled “Will the Real Dali Ever Stand Up?” The crux of his argument was the fact that the real Dali had never stood up because he lacked both sincerity and the ability to be sensible:

Obviously the word “sensible” could never be applied to Dali, being as irrelevant to his art as “sincere”. He was a showman, a show-off, an illusionist: he deliberately challenged his public to find him out, to discover where the divine madness ended and the commercial calculation began.

There is clearly a non sequitur in this line of reasoning. Dali was indubitably a showman, a show-off and an illusionist, and he obviously challenged his public to find him out, but it does not follow that a showman or a show-off or an illusionist lacks sincerity or is devoid of the ability to be sensible, nor does it follow that one who lays down a challenge lacks sincerity or good sense in so doing, nor that he expects or desires that those challenged should not rise to the challenge offered. The fact that one wears masks does not mean that one lacks a face underneath. The challenge is in revealing the face behind the mask, the truth behind the myth. And the truth is, as we have seen, that Dali had a good deal of sincerity in spite of his showmanship and that he was perfectly capable of being sensible in spite of the absurdity of some of his eccentricities.

To return to John Russell Taylor’s question, did the real Dali ever stand up? Yes, he did; and not only did he stand up, but in the important things in life, he stood up to be counted. He might not have been a saint or an angel, but for the most part, he was on the side of the angels and the saints.

63

_____

A True Story

SCENE ONE: IT DESCENDED INTO HELL

P
ICTURE THE SCENE
. A black night in the autumn of 1968. The moon is banished. Invisible clouds, hidden by the impenetrable darkness of which they are themselves the cause, cover the earth in an ominous cloak, threatening rain. There’s a chill in the air. A solitary walker, out for a midnight stroll in the solitude of the Norfolk countryside, trudges up Houghton Hill. The silence is stifling. The occasional scream of a screech owl and the soft rustling whisper of dying leaves break the unspoken conspiracy of silence that seems to permeate the breeze. At the top of the hill, the walker stumbles across the crumbling remains of two cottages, the remnants of a long-deserted village. Silhouetted against the murkiness, black on gray, their petrified carcasses act as ghostly guards of the dead village’s long-forgotten memories. It is then that the walker is surprised by the most startling discovery of all. There, in the midst of the deserted village, far from the nearest hearth or home, he finds himself in the presence of half a dozen parked cars. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, on an unpaved track leading nowhere . . . In these surroundings, the cars strike him as rather alarming incongruities. How did they get here? Why did they come? Who brought them? And where were the owners now?

Furtively, the walker looks around but finds no sign of life. Peering into the darkness, he believes he can see a leafy tower looming skyward, about twenty yards from the path. Straining his ears, he thinks he can hear human voices. Are they singing? Curiosity overcoming fear, he creeps through the overgrowth toward the dark tower. As he edges closer, the voices grow louder. They are joined in some sort of incantation. In Latin. Reaching the tower, he discovers that it is the derelict and ivy-covered ruin of the village church, long neglected, long forgotten and long ignored—except, apparently, by those whose voices he can now hear clearly.

Peering discreetly inside, he stops dead in his tracks, aghast at the sight in front of him. Around an altar in the middle of the nave, flickering in candlelight, are clustered a group of hooded figures, one of whom is holding aloft a skull from which drips blood, or is it wine? Bringing the upturned skull to his lips, he drinks from one of its crevices, the dark liquid spilling wantonly from other orifices of his cadaverous chalice as he swallows lasciviously.

Stifling a gurgling exclamation of disgust, the walker stumbles back into the sanity of the darkness . . .

SCENE TWO: DAVEY TAKES ON THE DEVIL

Picture the scene. Twenty and more years later. June 1992. Another walker stumbles across the ruined church of Houghton-on-the-Hill, this time in broad daylight on a bright summer’s day. The walker is Bob Davey, a gray-bearded elderly man, who moved to the nearby village of North Pickenham a few years earlier from Pulborough in Sussex. Clambering through the overgrown churchyard, he enters the church and is confronted by the sickening evidence of satanic practices. The church has been vandalized; the chancel steps have been smashed up; in the center of the nave is a satanic altar. Worst of all is the desecrated grave of a former pastor from which the skull and cross-bones have been removed, no doubt for use in the satanists’ perverse rite.

There and then the intrepid Mr. Davey resolves to put the devil to flight and to restore the once-proud church of Saint Mary to its former glory. Almost single-handedly, he sets about clearing the undergrowth and overgrowth. He plants flowers and tidies the graves. Finally he begins on the restoration of the church itself, repairing the roof and making many other renovations. He is threatened by death. An anonymous phone call tells him that a satanic curse has been placed on him and that he will “wither and die”. As a practicing Christian who trusts in the power of the One who never withers or dies, the intrepid Mr. Davey carries on regardless. The satanists still show signs of returning. Calling on the service of the Norwich unit of the Territorial Army, Mr. Davey lies in wait. When the devil worshipers arrive for one of their midnight debauches, they are greeted by a standing army that springs in ambush from the bushes. Shrieking in fear, the coven scatters, stumbling in fear back into the insanity of their darkness.

SCENE THREE: IT ROSE FROM THE DEAD

Picture the scene. Ten years later. Your intrepid reporter meets the intrepid Mr. Davey. The glorious English sunshine kisses the glorious churchyard of Saint Mary’s in a nuptial embrace. The day is as delightful as the Davey!

Mr. Davey’s rambunctiously gentle appearance and rustic Sussex accent reminds the reporter of Grizzlebeard in Belloc’s
The Four Men
. As the reporter has always desired, in his heart of hearts, to meet Grizzlebeard, he is more than happy to have met his spitting image in Mr. Davey.

Mr. Davey is clearly at home in this charming church, which is hardly surprising since it has literally served as a home from home over the past decade. He is also more than happy to offer any visitor a guided tour of the church’s restored splendor. With surprising speed and agility for one so resplendent in years, he ascends the narrow steps and ladder that lead to the roof of the tower. He then proceeds to point, north, south, east and west, indicating with pointed finger and eagle eye the notable landmarks in all directions. The tower of the church, standing as it does on the apex of a hill that, according to Mr. Davey, is the second highest summit in the whole of Norfolk, certainly offers spectacular views for miles around.

The most spectacular views are, however, to be found inside, and not outside, the church. On the east wall of the nave, uncovered during the renovation, are wall paintings depicting the “seat of mercy Trinity”, a very rare image of the Holy Trinity. God the Father is seated in the center, with a smaller image below His right hand depicting Christ on the Cross, and above this, a dove representing the Holy Spirit. Archaeologically, this represents a major discovery. According to Mr. Davey, the painting dates back from “at least three hundred years earlier than any “seat of mercy Trinity” wall paintings in England” and, even more intriguing, “at least two hundred years earlier than any ‘seat of mercy Trinity’ in France”. Since it had been thought previously that this particular depiction of the Trinity originated in France, it has left the experts baffled. A major rethink is required. Either there must be older “seat of mercy Trinity” depictions as yet undiscovered in France, or else the “seat of mercy Trinity” might actually have originated in England before being exported to France.

Mr. Davey’s enthusiasm for his subject is contagious. He points out with evident relish that this is not the only mystery uncovered during the renovation that has baffled the experts. “No expert agrees on the dating of the other wall paintings. Some say between 1000 and 1020, others insist they are prior to 950, and others suggest that they might be as late as 1090.” The wall paintings also represent “some of the earliest examples of the three-dimensional perspective”.

The many charms of Saint Mary’s are not consigned to the prestigious nature of the wall paintings. The keyhole arch was probably an original feature of the seventh-century Celtic church. Meanwhile, Mr. Davey recounts how he had recovered the original Saxon stoop from a garden in a nearby village, where it was being used as a birdbath. The original Saxon font was being used by a local rector for growing spring bulbs! It is now, thankfully and thanks to Mr. Davey, back in its rightful place in the church.

The parish chest, dating from 1724, is a veritable treasure chest of antiquities. These include a Bible, dating from 1708, and a
Book of Common Prayer
, dating from the following year. Listed in the latter tome are all of the “holy days of obligation” imposed by the “established church” on the people of England, for which they would be fined one shilling for failure to attend. These included 5 November, at which people were compelled to celebrate the foiling of the “traitorous and bloody” Gunpowder Plot and the subsequent execution of Guy Fawkes; the execution of Charles I by “cruel and unreasonable men”; and the restoration of Charles II, which was described as an “unspeakable mercy”. Clearly, the restored Saint Mary’s is itself the result of “unspeakable mercy” and astounding grace.